10 February 2009

Welcome back to westword and the second year of the Western Sydney Young People’s Literature project.

I was a bad blogger last year, and I am determined to update westword far more regularly in 2009. I will be adding posts soon about some of the highlights of 2008, and will also start listing forthcoming events and plans for the project.

I also plan to use this blog as a bit of a resource hub. In the past few months I have finally got myself organised with google reader, and have now added more than one hundred blogs, most of which deal with children’s and youth literature, literacy, publishing and related topics. (Also I am also now on Twitter, using my personal blog name (misrule_au) and am using it to post links to articles I have read of interest (as well as other bits and pieces of sense and nonsense). But I will also be putting those links here, starting with this post.

First of all is this interesting article from new Zealand about a new approach to literacy that is having enormous success, especially with Maori students:

In the first South Auckland study, involving seven schools, each child’s reading leapt ahead by an entire year. The technique also pushed far more children into the average or above categories – 40% made these top slots before the study started, and in three years that jumped to 70%. Maori children again did particularly well. The second group of seven different schools showed similar results.

The article doesn’t go into enormous detail about the program, but it’s been written up in Reading Research Quarterly, which I was able to access through ProQuest via Blacktown Library’s database.

Mr Cottrell Boyce said: “When I visit many schools, I see a big, fat, glaring, expensive anti-reading for pleasure signal.

“It stands where the library used to stand and it’s called the learning resource centre. To turn your library into a learning resource centre, you generally have to chuck out a bunch of valuable, durable assets – books – and replace them with sub-prime computers which will quickly date.”

From time to time I hear people say similar things are happening in Australian school libraries: can anyone comment? Are our school libraries in danger of refocusing away from books? Are we losing teacher-librarians from our schools? Please add your thoughts to the comment section. (Ditto public libraries, by the way—are we losing specialist children’s and youth services staff from our public libraries? We need to be really vigilant that we protect our libraries and the specialist support they offer young readers.)

Speaking of supporting young readers, and of the delightful Mr Rosen, read this article about Michael Rosen working in a school in Wales to encourage a love of reading. The BBC has made a TV show out of it (here’s the link, but we can’t watch the video outside of the UK), a la Jamie’s School Dinners. What do you reckon the chances are the ABC will screen it here? Should we start a campaign?

(And before I forget, I found this when I was looking for links to Frank Cottrell Boyce. Liverpool, where he lives, did one of those whole city reads the same book things with Millions. Isn’t this fantastic? If we did a Sydney Reads (or even a Western Sydney Reads), what book would you choose? And if you’re looking for resources to accompany Millions, don’t forget this official site from the publisher, which also happens to be very entertaining.)

I’ve visited over 200 schools in the last couple of years, which means I must have run workshops for over 40,000 boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 13. By the time the students reach Year 8, I can predict almost word for word what their story ideas will be, from any given starting point. Even if they think they’re being subversive, in fact especially when they think that, the older the student is, the more predictable the ideas.

The biggest change comes in Year 7, which statistically is also when there’s the biggest drop off in reading – especially in boys. Now, it perhaps seems obvious that the withering of originality is greatly caused by reading less. But I think it’s also the other way round: they read less because their creative spark is consistently doused. Their connection with stories, with ideas and imagination, is stifled by the school environment. If the fun has gone from stories, why read?

I imagine if I were still in the English classroom that I’d be a bit affronted by this article, but I actually suspect there be more than a grain of truth to it. We hear stories from time to time of boy students getting into trouble for things they have written—I think it’s partly teachers’ reasonable concerns about their legal responsibilities to report potential threats or child endangerment, but I do think that Craig is spot on when he suggests that boys’ “wacky ideas” need to be celebrated. Girls’ too, for that matter. (The stuff this article raises about gender as it pertains to reading, writing and classroom practice are, I think, fascinating.)

This is a very UK-centric post, for which I don’t apologise—I think it’s important we keep track of what’s happening with our colleagues, and with education and books and authors and so on around the world. Having said that, I popped over to the Sydney Morning Herald to see if there were any articles of interest in their Education section, and I got a “page not found” message. Humph.

20 October 2008

That’s what the Western Sydney Young People’s Literature Project is all about: opportunities for young readers and writers, but also for their teachers and librarians. Opportunities to participate in events, to meet and work with authors and illustrators, but also opportunities to help others out, which brings me to today’s post:

A young man named Morgan (he’s 16, but I am not sure where in Australia he lives) is building a library in Fiji, where he has worked as a volunteer during his last two winter school holidays. I’ll let Morgan speak for himself (which he is clearly more than capable of doing!):

My name is Morgan Hayton. I am 16 years old.

I have spent my winter school holidays for two years in Fiji volunteering at a local school as part of my schools mission team. We visit a very remote school that is struggling and has only handful books in the whole school, the teachers there can only dream of starting a library.

Have you ever wanted to change the world? But think it is impossible because we are just one person? Me too. But then I came up with this idea.

We are going to build a library together.

One person, one book at a time.

One person can’t build a library but if everyone that reads this gets a book from their bookshelf (they don’t have to be new) and posts it to the school in Fiji, we can build a library together.

Step 1
A small book no more 2cm thick up to 250g ( that’s like a Dr Seuss soft cover) in an A4 envelope costs $4.20 to post.

There is no sea mail to Fiji so this is the best way to get books there. Mark the package either used book, ift or printed matter only.

Namara Village District School
Namara Village
FIJI

Step 2
Please write your a small bit about yourself or family inside the cover the kids would love to know who you are and where to book came from.

Step 3 Tell a friend

Checkout my photos go to my facebook page “Books for Fiji” or email my atbooksforfiji@hotmail.com
and I will keep in touch and next June when I visit I will take some more photos and show you what some great people can do.

Thank you
Morgan

I know you can’t access Facebook from school, but nevertheless you can join Morgan’s Facebook group here.

I always love it when young people take an initiative like this, so if you have a spare children’s book and a spare few dollars lying around, why not send that book off to Fiji.

7 July 2008

Schools can win a complete library of Tashi books. To win, you need to write in 50 words or less why you like to recommend the Tashi books to your students. Easy! For entry information go here—but be quick, entries close July 15.

The “Queen of Crime” competition is open to young women under the age of 18 as of 1 January 2008. The competition is for a 2000 word story with a crime or mystery as its theme. First prize — $200, 2nd — $75, 3rd — $25.

2 June 2008

As I mentioned in my report last week, the teacher-librarians at the network meeting I attended had some really practical suggestions about how they might find this blog useful, which I am starting to follow up on. One of the t-ls was after a convenient link to author sites—a one stop shop, if you will. Lots of authors and illustrator have their own sites, so it can be a simple matter of just googling whoever you’re interested in, but a more comprehensive site would be really useful.

And there is such a site! In fact, there may be several, but one I am familiar with is hosted by the fantastic team at Curriculum Materials Information Services (CMIS) team at the Department of Education and Training in Western Australia. The site is very user-friendly—there’s an alphabetical index, and the author/illustrator sites listed are coded to indicate if they’re Australian (or WA). There’s also a readership level guide for fiction titles.

Following a link to an individual (say, Morris Gleitzman) takes you to a potted summary of their work and major titles, and if they have their own website—voila!—the link is there as well.

The CMIS author/illustrator site also has sections that link to interviews and other useful information about booking authors into schools and so on. And CMIS’s “Focus on Fiction” site has all sorts of other links—to book awards, classroom resources, and links to review journals and so on.

Finally, the CMIS team keep up an excellent blog about children’s and youth literature. They are much more dedicated bloggers than me—they update pretty much every day. I’ve added the link to westword’s blogroll (eyes right→) and I recommend it highly as a hub of news and views of interest to all of us working with young people and their literature.